As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
The use of management controllers in information handling systems has increased in recent years. Broadly speaking, a management controller may be thought of any device, system, or apparatus configured to facilitate management and control of a collection of information handling resources. For example, a management controller may be utilized in a server chassis to facilitate management and control of individual server blades and shared resources of the chassis (e.g., fans). As another example, a management controller may be utilized in a storage enclosure to facilitate management and control of individual storage resources (e.g., hard disk drives).
During operation of a management controller and/or the various information handling resources it manages, numerous events may occur that may cause the management controller to go “offline,” thus potentially leading to unavailability of the managed information handling resources. Such events may include firmware updates, firmware rollbacks, boot processes, user-initiated management controller resets, watchdog timeouts, kernel panic, etc.
Accordingly, to provide high availability of information handling resources, it is often desirable to maintain redundancy for a management controller, in order to prevent downtime. A traditional approach to provide redundancy typically includes the use of a plurality of redundant physical management controllers. However, such a solution is often impractical due to the cost inherent in the inclusion of multiple hardware devices, as well as the complexity associated with such a solution (e.g., the redundant management controllers typically require a complex set of “handshakes” in order to operate effectively).